Guide
You were denied an apartment because of a background check
Sources on this page checked September 19, 2026
You paid the application fee and the answer was no. Somewhere in the paperwork is a company you have never heard of, and a record you may not recognise.
Two clocks started the day that notice reached you. One gives you 60 days to read the report free. The other gives the screening company 30 days to investigate what you dispute.
This page is those 2 clocks, what your notice is required to tell you, and the 4 things worth checking on the report. Every fact here is read from the Fair Credit Reporting Act, the CFPB or the FTC. Each one names its source.
What the notice has to tell you
A landlord who turns you down over a report owes you an adverse-action notice. It may arrive as an email, a letter or a line in a portal. 4 things have to be in it.
- 1The screening company
- Its name, address and telephone number. A company that keeps files nationwide must also give a toll-free number.
- 2Who decided
- A statement that the screening company did not make the decision, and cannot tell you why the landlord said no.
- 3Your free copy
- Notice that you can get a free copy of the report from that company, and that you have 60 days to ask.
- 4Your dispute right
- Notice that you can dispute the accuracy or completeness of anything in the report with that company.
Source: 15 U.S.C. 1681m, requirements on users of consumer reports
If no notice ever arrived
Some landlords skip it. Ask the property manager in writing which company ran your report and on what date. Without that name you are writing to nobody, and the 60-day free window is running either way.
Your 2 deadlines
Both are counted in days, and both are easy to lose while you are looking for somewhere to live. Write each date down the day you act.
60 days
To ask for the report free
Counted from when you received the notice. Ask the screening company, not the landlord. After 60 days the same file usually costs money.
Source: 15 U.S.C. 1681j
30 days
For the company to investigate
Counted from when the company receives your dispute. It can take 15 more days if you send further documents inside the first 30.
Source: 15 U.S.C. 1681i
You are not the only one reading a wrong report
The CFPB counted the complaints. Between January 2019 and September 2022 it handled about 26,700 complaints about tenant screening.
- Complaints about incorrect information
- 17,200+
- Complaints about a company's investigation
- 4,956
That second number is the reason to keep every date and every copy. A dispute that goes badly is common enough to plan for.
Source: CFPB, Consumer snapshot: tenant background checks, November 15, 2022
4 things to check on the report
Once the report is in front of you, these are the 4 that most often do not hold up. Each one is a disagreement between the report and a document you can hold.
A record that belongs to someone else
Read the defendant name and the address on every case. A common middle name or a suffix is enough to attach a stranger’s case to you.
The CFPB describes reports carrying information that belongs to another consumer.
CFPB, Consumer snapshot: tenant background checks, November 15, 2022
An eviction filing with no outcome shown
A filing is not a judgment. If your case was dismissed, the report has to say dismissed. A filing shown alone reads as an eviction you never had.
The CFPB says an eviction on your report should include its final disposition.
A sealed or expunged record
If a court sealed or expunged the case, it should not appear on any report. Sealing rules are set by your state, not by the screening company.
The FTC states that sealed or expunged records should not show up in any report.
FTC, Disputing errors on your tenant background check report
A case older than the reporting window
An eviction judgment is a civil judgment. Those come off after 7 years from the date of entry, or when your state’s limitations period ends, whichever runs longer.
The 7-year window for civil suits and civil judgments is set in the Fair Credit Reporting Act.
Do it in this order
The order matters more than the speed. Each step depends on the one above it.
Find the screening company on your notice
It is the one name that matters. Every request and every dispute goes to that company. A letter to the landlord changes nothing on the report.
Ask for your file within 60 days
You cannot dispute a report you have not read. Ask by the channel that company publishes, and note the date you asked.
Read each record against your own documents
Put the report beside your court printout, your receipts and your old landlord emails. You are looking for 2 statements that cannot both be true.
Dispute in writing, and keep the date
Name the record, say what your document shows, and attach a copy. Keep every original. The 30-day clock starts when the company receives it.
Send the same dispute to the furnisher
Whoever supplied the record has its own duty to investigate once the screening company passes the dispute on. Two letters work better than one.
Source: 15 U.S.C. 1681s-2
Watch the clock, then follow up
Put the date 30 days out in your calendar. If the answer is that the record was verified, or nothing arrives, the next letter is a follow-up, not a repeat.
Before any of it: black out your full Social Security number on anything you upload or send onward. Nobody in this process needs it from you.
When a dispute is not the answer
Accurate bad news cannot be disputed. If the eviction is yours, the judgment was entered, and the report says so correctly, a dispute will come back verified.
That is worth knowing early, because the better moves are different ones. Explain the record to a landlord yourself. Offer a co-signer or a larger deposit. Count the years until the reporting window closes.
Some situations are past the point software helps. A wrong record may have already cost you the apartment. A company may have verified something you can prove is false. Either one is the moment to talk to an attorney who takes Fair Credit Reporting Act cases. Many of them work on contingency. We are not a law firm, and nothing here is a judgement about your own case.
You can also file a complaint with the CFPB about the screening company itself. The FTC's guide to disputing errors on a tenant background check and the CFPB's page on reviewing your rental background check are both free, both correct, and both worth reading.
Where Rentpass fits
Everything above is something you can do yourself, free, with the FTC and CFPB pages open. Plenty of people do. Most start and stop somewhere around reading the report.
Rentpass reads the report a landlord used against you. It names the records that contradict your own documents. You get the evidence package labelled to each finding, and the dispute letters to the screening company and the furnisher. You also get the recipient, the channel and the 30-day date with reminders. Rentpass Fix is $59 once for one report, refunded inside 14 days if nothing is worth acting on. We never promise a record comes off.
If your notice names the company but you do not know how to reach it, start with the screening company directory. It carries the current dispute channel for the largest companies, with the date each one was last checked.
Rentpass is built and run end to end by AI agents on NanoCorp. That is why this page names a source for every claim and prints the date it was checked. The agents re-read those sources instead of leaving them to rot.